


the art of asterisms

by samarqand



Category: Superman (Comics)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-14
Updated: 2013-02-14
Packaged: 2017-11-29 05:57:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/683626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samarqand/pseuds/samarqand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set during Mark Waid's Superman: Birthright.  A school-age Clark and Lex try and probably fail to understand one another over a late-night star-gazing session.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the art of asterisms

For all the things Lex Luthor knows, he avoids knowing others. Clark’s professional-grade pigeon calls, this is a note on Clark’s character profile that could be tucked away for future reference, but one that Lex eagerly discards. He’d clapped his hand over Clark’s mouth and shoved him aside after Clark asked him if he was prepared to be amazed. 

He doesn’t care to hear about the moment Clark became self-aware, a being sharing this world with so many other unknowable things. Lex calls it painfully pedestrian. Everyone in a 50 acre radius has defeated puberty. As they’ve surpassed rudimentary levels of differentiation, reflecting on their introductions to basic cognitive function is essentially degeneration.

“That’s what’s wrong with you,” Lex diagnoses, twisting the telescope’s focus knob with ruthlessness that once made Clark cringe, before he’d learned to overlook it. ”Your cognitive delays are mostly due to your propensity for distracting yourself with rubbish.”

Clark opens his mouth, then shuts it.

Onward: “Fifteen minutes you take to learn to mimic a lesser creature. Try to imagine, if you can, how many other advances on absolutely anything else you could have been doing meanwhile.”

Clark presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. ”So you’re saying I’ve got potential?”

“More than most in this dive,” Lex says. He passes a hand over his forehead. Not a hair out of place on his severe hairline. ”Though environment has done its damage on you, seeing as you spend some of your time behaving as they would.”

“I like thinking about different things. You know what they say,” Clark says, with a touch of commercial jollity in his voice, to keep Lex confident no one is here to batter him for speaking up, “Variety is the spice of life. Right?”

“Reductionist. Wrong.” Lex twerks the knobs back into place and leans back onto the slanting roof, body reluctantly relaxing against it. His eyes watch what the telescope had directed him toward, some distant predicament to be monitored and dissected. Light years beyond him. ”If I were to spend the rest of my life on this roof, with my gaze interminably directed at this angle, would you call that dull, Kent? Would you expect stacking some bales of hay would be just ‘what the doctor ordered’ after a couple minutes of scanning the sky?”

“No,” Clark says sincerely. Then, just as sincerely, “Maybe sometimes.”

“Make up your damn mind.”

Clark’s eyebrows raise. ”Yikes,” he notes.

“Oh, please,” Lex grouses. ”That’s what keeps you down, Kent. You’ve got some amount of intellect in you. That’s more than I can say for anyone else in a fifty mile radius of this roof. You’ve got some interest. But you don’t have a vested interest in what goes on above our heads. The stars mean nothing to you, not like they do to me. I see their worth. And you?”

Clark begins to shrug. ”I think we see the same things, in our own ways.”

Lex shakes his head. Clark leans back until his head thunks against the grip of roofing, the grey shingles digging into his skull. He follows the turn of Lex’s neck and finds a shadowed rift among the stars. 

A nebula riptide: a dark cloud constellation. A trench swimming with fantastic secrets.

For a moment they stare into the dark without a sound.

He looks at Lex and finds Lex looking at him, at the color of his eyes. He’ll do that, dissection with a look, tearing back layers to find the code, so that he can learn to manipulate it. ”You see it,” he verifies. ”That dark patch. And I know what you’re thinking.”

“Shoot,” Clark says.

“You’re thinking of the Inca and Aboriginals and they way they’d make dark cloud constellations of animals.” Lex narrows his eyes. ”You’re thinking about emus.”

Clark frowns. ”Well, now I am. Thanks.”

“It was only a matter of time.” Lex pillows his head with his hands like he does when he’s sleepy. He does this more often these days, now that he’s grown comfortable with the roof and its inevitable company. Two-thirty AM: he can divest himself of his armor for a moment. “Me, I can see the blackness for what it is.”

“What is it?”

“An opportunity.”

A profound one, to lose a sense that anything ever existed at all. Except you.

And maybe that’s what Lex may call liberation. 

It seems a lonely thing, to be assured of nothing else but simply this: you are.

Clark had wanted to tell Lex about the cows. He’d been terribly young here. He’d followed the cattle out to pasture, the day Pa opened the barn doors after they’d huddling in the barn for the winter months.

Spring blinked awake slowly. Warm enough for the cows, brisk but finally the right bright morning. 

Pa smiled and threw open every door for the cattle and they escaped like birds from their cages.

The cattle leaped into the sun and pranced like show ponies. They jumped and fell against the new grass in spite of the ebbing frost. They made tremendous noise as they ran. They played like they’d reunited after months of absence.

Clark remembers perching on the tractor to be out of their way, to let them have their moment. It’s theirs, he thought at five years old. It’s not mine. Some moments will be others’, and they will know them, and I will not. Just as I will have mine.

He found Pa standing at the doors of the abandoned barn and tried to imagine what Pa was thinking, with that broad smile on his face. He walked into Pa and hid his face in Pa’s flannel shirt and wrapped his arms around him until Pa picked him up. 

But.

Lex thinks of all those grazing harmless things in evolutionary perspective. He can discuss them as givens. There is nothing remarkable about a cow’s instinct to stretch its legs. There is no art in the asterisms. 

Clark thinks that maybe Lex thinks what good does it do, embracing empathy. Command of physical space and collection of conjecture and all the assurance that you alone can say, You Are Here: maybe that is what matters. 

Fall deep enough into that void that you train your eye on, and you’ve been fighting for so long for something to happen that this could be when it happens. That is what an hand is meant to grasp for.

Lex believes, perhaps, in physical proximity. There is a calculation for the distance between his and Clark’s shoulders and the way it grows ever smaller, like the earth’s proximity to the sun. Someday it may grow remote again. Their two bodies will never collide. Touch is disaster. 

What holds weight is command. Command of physical space. Collection of conjecture. Lex has been waiting for something to happen to him. 

And it will. It must. Even in a place that only may exist.


End file.
